Professor Jenny Hocking - A Nominee for The 2020 Bruce Pascoe Award for Historical Accuracy?
Political scientist and Whitlam biographer, Professor Jenny Hocking recently wrote an opinion piece on the contents of ‘The Palace Letters’, the correspondence regarding the dismissal of the Whitlam Government, that she most tenaciously and ultimately successfully fought in the High Court to have made public.
In The Age opinion piece she writes,
‘The Palace letters have proved to be every bit the bombshell they promised to be, and neither the Queen nor Sir John Kerr emerge unscathed. In his vast, increasingly frequent letters and telegrams to the Queen, the governor-general provides the most extraordinary vice-regal commentary on the decisions and actions of a prime minister and elected government imaginable.
They provide a remarkable window onto Kerr’s views of Gough Whitlam, his planning, his options, his fears, and his eventual decision to dismiss the government. Letter by letter, particularly from late August 1975, months before supply had even been blocked in the Senate, Kerr draws the Queen into his planning regarding the crisis unfolding in the Senate, including the possible use of the reserve powers. Kerr details options and strategies, which are then discussed with the Queen through her private secretary, Sir Martin Charteris.
These include Kerr’s concern that prime minister Whitlam might recall him as governor-general, which he discussed with Prince Charles in September 1975 in a profound breach of political and constitutional practice. Charteris writes:
"Prince Charles told me a good deal of his conversation with you and in particular that you had spoken of the possibility of the Prime Minister advising The Queen to terminate your Commission with the object, presumably, of replacing you with someone more amenable to his wishes. If such an approach was made you may be sure that The Queen would take most unkindly to it."
It is a defining feature of a constitutional monarchy that the monarch "has to remain strictly neutral with respect to political matters", that the Queen must remain above politics at all times. Hundreds of pages challenge that claimed political disinterest, as Kerr relays conversations, meetings, and events to Buckingham Palace in the context of the most intensely political situation unfolding in Australia.’
Two days later, in The Age comments section, historian Philip Bull of Ivanhoe, Victoria wrote,
‘THE PALACE LETTERS - Queen would have to follow Whitlam’s advice
‘As an historian, I support and admire Jenny Hocking for her commitment to securing the right of Australians to read the correspondence relating to the dismissal of the Whitlam government. In her article (Comment, 15/7), she quotes Sir Martin Charteris’s comment that the Queen ‘‘would take most unkindly’’ to a request from Gough Whitlam to dismiss Sir John Kerr, a worry the latter had some time before his dismissal of Whitlam.
However, Professor Hocking omits the more important part of what Charteris wrote on this, namely that as a constitutional monarch the Queen would have no option but to follow Whitlam’s advice.
I hope her omission was inadvertent as it makes a big difference to the substance of what was written’. - Philip Bull, Ivanhoe - (our emphasis).
We tracked down the actual, 2nd October 1975 Palace Letter from which Professor Hocking quotes, or rather selectively quotes, from and we confirm what historian Philip Bull has found, namely that, Professor Hocking has selectively omitted a relevant sentence in her quoting of the Palace Letter, which as Philip Bull notes, ‘makes a big difference to the substance of what was written’.
To our mind, this example of Professor Hocking’s writing, may be another case of selectively misquoting the historical records to slant the narrative, a la Bruce Pascoe and Dark Emu.
Readers can judge for themselves by checking the relevent text of the Palace letter in question, that of 2nd of October 1975 below :
The full, relevant text on page 2 from the Palace Letter, reads as follows with the crucial section omitted by Professor Hocking in bold.
…’Prince Charles told me a good deal of his conversation with you and in particular that you had spoken of the possibility of the Prime Minister advising The Queen to terminate your commission with the object, presumably, of replacing you with someone more amenable to his wishes.
If such an approach was made you may be sure that The Queen would take most unkindly to it.’
[Professor Hocking’s quotation ends here, which might lead the reader to think that The Queen is potentially ‘plotting’ with the Governor General, but the letter continues with]
‘There would be considerable comings and goings, but I think that it is right that I should make the point that at the end of the road The Queen, as a Constitutional Sovereign, would have no option but to follow the advice of her Prime Minister’…
[Which only confirms to the reader that The Queen has no intention of acting in any way contrary to convention and will do what Prime Minister Whitlam advises her to do].
So, as we see it, there are two possibilities for Professor Hocking’s omission.
Either, as Philip Bull most kindly hopes, ‘her omission was inadvertent’, or alternatively, the omission was made to remove some ‘problematic’ text which Philip Bull notes, ‘makes a big difference to the substance of what was written’.
Unless Professor Hocking indicates otherwise, many readers might tend to believe the latter reason, and therefore, many readers might consider her a Nominee for the 2020 Bruce Pascoe Award for Historical Accuracy.
